Global executions hit 44-year high as 2,707 people put to death in 2025

The numbers arrived quietly in May 2026, compiled by researchers at Amnesty International who had spent months documenting state killings across the globe. At least 2,707 people were executed in 2025—a 78 percent jump from the 1,518 recorded the year before. It was the highest annual toll since 1981, and it told a story about which governments had decided that death was the answer to their problems.

The executions were not evenly distributed. Just seventeen countries accounted for all of them. Iran and Saudi Arabia dominated the list, followed by Iraq, North Korea, Yemen, Vietnam, the United States, Egypt, Singapore, and Kuwait. But even this accounting was incomplete. China, which Amnesty International believes executes thousands annually for crimes ranging from drug trafficking to corruption to alleged threats against the state, does not publish those figures. The real global number was almost certainly far higher.

In Iran, where 2,159 of the documented executions took place, the machinery of state killing had accelerated dramatically. The government had intensified capital punishment as a tool of political control following a twelve-day military conflict with Israel and in response to the Woman Life Freedom protests that erupted in September 2022 after the death of Jina Mahsa Amini in police custody. By 2025, authorities were fast-tracking trials for anyone suspected of supporting hostile foreign powers, particularly Israel. The charges often invoked national security—a justification broad enough to encompass almost anything the state wished to punish. The 2,159 figure did not even include executions carried out in January 2026, when massive protests in Tehran prompted a government crackdown that officials claimed killed 3,117 people, though medical sources suggested the actual death toll could have reached 30,000.

Saudi Arabia, meanwhile, had set a record with 356 executions. Two-thirds of them were for drug trafficking, a crime the kingdom had designated as capital since 1988. The vast majority of those executed were foreign nationals—78 percent of those put to death for drug offenses came from countries like Egypt, Nigeria, and Pakistan. In June alone, authorities carried out forty-six executions, thirty-seven of them drug-related. Forty-five additional executions involved terrorism charges, many targeting members of the Shia minority who had participated in anti-government protests years earlier, between 2011 and 2013.

Amnesty International's researchers documented systematic violations of international law across multiple jurisdictions. At least seventeen public executions occurred in Afghanistan and Iran. Both Iran and Saudi Arabia had executed people for crimes committed when they were under eighteen years old—a practice prohibited under international law. The United States and Japan had imposed death sentences on people with intellectual disabilities. In China, Egypt, Iraq, and Yemen, trials lacked basic due process protections. In Iran and Saudi Arabia especially, confessions appeared to have been extracted through torture. Bangladesh and Sri Lanka had handed down death sentences in the absence of the accused.

Agnès Callamard, Amnesty International's secretary general, framed the spike as the work of a small, isolated group of states willing to execute at any cost, even as the global trend continued toward abolition. She noted that millions of people worldwide were actively resisting capital punishment, a sign of what she called shared humanity. The 2025 figures represented a grim milestone, but they also reflected something else: the growing international isolation of governments that still believed execution was a legitimate tool of statecraft.